His advisers want him to bring waterboarding back. Challenging Obama on torture might be his debate surprise

By Alex Pareene

(Credit: AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File; Salon)

It seems likely that a President Mitt Romney would rescind the executive order issued by President Barack Obama outlawing torture. His own policy advisers have told him to do so, according to a memo obtained by the New York Times. (Mitt Romney’s advisers are doing everything they can to encourage the liberal debate over the morality of supporting Obama in the face of his miserable civil liberties record.)

Americans are more accepting of torture now than they were when America was doing it.

In an October 2007 Rasmussen poll, 27 percent of Americans surveyed said the United States should torture prisoners captured in the fight against terrorism, while 53 percent said it should not. In my YouGov poll, 41 percent said they would be willing to use torture — a gain of 14 points — while 34 percent would not, a decline of 19 points.

It gets worse: More Americans also support specific torture techniques, including waterboarding, than did in 2005. (Bush’s favorable ratings are gradually rising, too.) It’s not a large number of Americans who have suddenly come around on torturing prisoners, but Romney’s looking for any advantage he can get, and he’s shameless. Romney has likely already decided to bring torture back once he’s in office, so the only calculation is between waiting until he’s won to announce it or trying to use it for political advantage now.

And honestly, as awful as campaign coverage of the ensuing torture “debate” would be, it would at least draw into the open what the Republican Party has so far been oddly quiet about: That the next Republican president will almost certainly bring torture back, because Bush made it GOP policy.

A Michigan sophomore beamed last night as she faced the bullies who voted her to the homecoming court as a sick joke.
After initially planning to skip the celebrations, Whitney Kropp, 16, bravely walked out onto the field during Ogemaw Heights High School's homecoming football game to accept the honour, and more than 1,000 people showed up to support her.
'The kids that are bullying you, do not let them bring you down. Stand up for what you believe in and go with your heart and go with your gut,' Whitney said, shortly after the halftime celebration

Being cruelly selected to the West Branch high school's homecoming court as a joke prompted student to pick on Whitney both at school and on Facebook, her mother told NBC.
Whitney admitted she wasn't one of the popular students at Ogemaw, but didn't think her classmates could stoop so low. Yet the bullying became so relentless that she thought about taking her own life.
She told WNEM-TV: 'I had actually reached a point where I had thought about suicide for how bad this case was in. I thought I wasn't worthy at Ogemaw Heights at all.'
'I felt like I wasn’t worthy,' she added on the Today show. 'Why even be a part of this community, this world if I’m just going to be tossed around like basically a piece of trash?'

But the savage bullying was soon overpowered by a tremendous outpouring of support for the teen.
A former student, Jamie Kline set up a Facebook page 'Support Whitney Kropp,' which has shared her story of bullying with more than 100,000 since it was created.

The Fars News Agency reprinted a parody story on how rural whites prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama

By Natasha Lennard

A major Iranian news agency, the Fars News Agency, is evidently not familiar with America’s most popular parody news source. Without attribution, the news site affiliated with the Islamic Revolutions Guards Corps reprinted an Onion story, which read, “According to the results of a Gallup poll released Monday, the overwhelming majority of rural white Americans said they would rather vote for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than US President Barack Obama.”

The Onion’s made-up poll was accompanied by made-up comments, reprinted in full by the Fars News Agency, including: ” takes national defense seriously, and he’d never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does.”

The Republican presidential candidate came down on teachers unions for supporting political candidates during an NBC-sponsored forum on education in New York City. During the "Education Nation" event, moderator Brian Williams asked Romney about his thoughts on the teachers' strike in Chicago.

"I don’t know that I would prevent teachers from being able to strike,” Romney said, acknowledging that "allowing to teachers to strike on matters such as compensation" is within their rights.

Instead, Romney said the focus should be on removing the teachers unions' money from the political equation.

" I think we’ve got to get the money out of the teachers unions going into campaigns. It’s the wrong way for us to go. We’ve got to separate that.”

At UnSkewed Polls, "liberal media bias" is removed from every survey that shows Obama ahead. Guess who wins?

By Alex Pareene

I present UnSkewedPolls.com, the best new website on the political Internet. UnSkewed Polls finally removes the “liberal media bias” from every single national opinion poll, and it turns out that “unskewing” them means “making it so that Romney is ahead by a lot.” Rick Perry approves!

The UnSkewed Average has Romney at 51.8 percent and Obama at a mere 44 percent. How does the genius behind UnSkewed Polls go about unskewing all the polls — like, for real, the vast majority of polls — that show the opposite result? Well, Dean Chambers, the polling genius behind the site, simply “re-weights” every single national poll to reflect his belief that Republicans are undersampled, based on right-leaning pollster Rasmussen’s partisan breakdown of the electorate. (Scott Rasmussen blurbs: “you cannot compare partisan weighting from one polling firm to another.”)

And obviously “re-weighting” every single poll to reflect an electorate made up of a plurality of self-identified Republicans also involves a bit of guesswork! Like, for example, sometimes polls don’t include crosstabs, so Mr. Unskewed just assumes they’re skewed with liberal media bias, and corrects accordingly.

Rasmussen’s party ID makeup does not remotely resemble any other organization’s party ID makeup. Every other organization finds that more Americans identify as Democrats or independents than Republicans, and that has been the case for years, even as Democratic Party affiliation has fallen. (Even in horrible years for Democrats, Gallup and Pew find more people identifying as Democrat than Republican.) “Correcting” polls to reflect Rasmussen’s outlier party ID finding basically means predicting Romney will win by a wider margin than any candidate from either party since 1988, which is … unlikely!

Mitt Romney likes to say he won't "apologize" for his success in business. But what he never says is "thank you" – to the American people – for the federal bailout of Bain & Company that made so much of his outsize wealth possible.

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How had Romney scored such a favorable deal at the FDIC's expense? It didn't hurt that he had close ties to the agency – the kind of "crony capitalism" he now decries. A month before he closed the 1991 loan agreement, Romney promoted a former FDIC bank examiner to become a senior executive at Bain. He also had pull at the top: FDIC chairman Bill Seidman, who had served as finance chair for Romney's father when he ran for president in 1968.

The federal documents also reveal that, contrary to Romney's claim that he returned full time to Bain Capital in 1992, he remained involved in bailout negotiations to the very end. In a letter dated March 23rd, 1993, Romney reassured creditors that his latest scheme would return Bain & Company to "long-term financial stability." That same month, Romney once again threatened to "pay out maximum bonus distributions" to top executives unless much of Bain's debt was erased.

In the end, the government surrendered. At the time, The Boston Globe cited bankers dismissing the bailout as "relatively routine" – but the federal documents reveal it was anything but. The FDIC agreed to accept nearly $5 million in cash to retire $15 million in Bain's debt – an immediate government bailout of $10 million. All told, the FDIC estimated it would recoup just $14 million of the $30 million that Romney's firm owed the government.

It was a raw deal – but Romney's threat to loot his own firm had left the government with no other choice. If the FDIC had pushed Bain into bankruptcy, the records reveal, the agency would have recouped just $3.56 million from the firm.

A poll released Monday by the Civitas Institute shows President Barack Obama leading Republican Mitt Romney by four percentage points in North Carolina – the latest poll to show Obama gaining an edge in a state widely considered among 10 or so battleground states.

The poll was conducted for the conservative think tank by National Research on Sept. 18 and 19. It asked 600 likely voters who they would vote for if the election were held today; 49 percent chose Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, and 45 percent chose Romney and his running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.

When Libertarian candidates Gary Johnson and running mate James P. Gray were included, 47 percent said they favored Obama and Biden, 43 percent went for Romney and Ryan, and 4 percent favored the Libertarian ticket. It was the first Civitas poll to include the Libertarians.

The poll has a margin of error of four percentage points.

A High Point University poll released last week showed Obama with a slight edge among registered voters, 46 percent to 43 percent for Romney.

Obviously, I do not agree with this article. In fact I think it is stark raving insane. But I am genuinely fascinated with the alternative reality one can find in a publication that is considered completely mainstream within conservative Republican circles.

It has gotten so bad for the Obama campaign that even Politico is starting to notice that Obama's got nothing much to offer voters and can't articulate an appealing message. Of course, in order to break this news to inhabitants of the liberal bubble, it casts the problem as a "stumble out of the gate" -- sticking to the beloved horse race metaphor. Heavyweights Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei write:

Obama, not Mitt Romney, is the one with the muddled message - and the one who often comes across as baldly political. Obama, not Romney, is the one facing blowback from his own party on the central issue of the campaign so far - Romney's history with Bain Capital. And most remarkably, Obama, not Romney, is the one falling behind in fundraising.

Obama personally seems immune to negative feedback. Valerie Jarrett and Michelle keep him insulated from negative information, and to the extent the campaign follows his directives, it will continue to believe that his magical personality will persuade voters that piling on debt and demonizing business are just the medicine our ailing economy needs. It will work about as well as his magical personality has worked with the Iranian mullahs.

There's lots of interesting horse race detail in the Politico piece, by the way. The Awful Truth about Obama is sinking in throughout the Democrat establishment. Many of these people fear an electoral wipeout, with discouraged Democrats staying home.